The Cosmologist They Couldn't Bury

Wallace Thornhill, the Electric Universe, and a voice worth keeping alive

I was recently interviewed by John Craig of Real Rover on digital sovereignty, and I explored John’s video archive and came across a video interview with a person I had a lot of respct for, Wal Thhornhill. John runs one of the better long-form independent interview shows out there — he sits down with people you’d otherwise never hear from and lets them actually talk, which is rarer than it should be.

Quick heads-up before we go further: Wal was a bit of a shit-disturber, and he rattled the establishment cage — the OrthoBox, if you like — for fifty years. So if you go look him up, Wikipedia and the rest of the empirical-establishment outlets will tell you he was a "pseudoscientist." That label is lazy and untrue. Wal wasn't anti-science. He engaged with “first principles” thinking, asked the questions institutional players couldn't afford to ask, and refused to confuse equations on a blackboard with an actual understanding of the physical world. Calling him a pseudoscientist is what gatekeepers do when they can't engage the substance.

Which is why I want to draw your attention to another of his interviews: the one he did with Wallace Thornhill.

Wal was someone I followed for years, respected deeply, and was lucky enough to connect with personally before he passed. He died peacefully on February 7, 2023, surrounded by family in Canberra, at the age of eighty. The conversation John captured is one of the best ways left to spend an hour with him: open, calm, generous with his time, still on fire with the same questions that drove him for fifty years.

If this post does one useful thing, let it be this: share the interview. Send it to the curious person in your life. Send it to the kid in physics class who already suspects something is off about the textbook. Wal believed the shift had to come from the public — that the institutions wouldn’t move until the people insisted — and the only way that happens is one share at a time.

“It Tells You More About the Writer Than About the Theory”

John opened by reading Wal a passage from RationalWiki dismissing the Electric Universe as “pseudoscientific cosmological ideas... tall tales from mythology... delusional cranks.” Wal’s response was characteristic:

“I don’t bother reading these points, because it tells you more about the person who’s writing it than it does about the electric universe.”

He then named what was actually going on. The complaint that EU lacks mathematical formalism, he said, gets the order of operations exactly backward:

“The very first thing you must do when you’re doing physics — and I emphasize physics, which is all about the physical universe — is to have some physical model in mind. This is something completely lacking in modern science. It’s all become mathematical mysticism. When you realize that simple symbols on the board, like E equals MC squared — there is no definition in physics of energy, there is no physical definition of mass, and the speed of light is not understood because light itself is not understood. And yet that’s the thing we examine the deep universe with.”

A blackboard packed with equations isn’t a theory of the world. It’s a theory of the symbols on the blackboard. Wal spent his career insisting on the difference, and it cost him every conventional door he might have walked through. He walked his own anyway.

The Velikovsky Inheritance — and the Burning of His Books

Wal’s path started where so many EU paths start: with a copy of Immanuel Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision, handed to a teenage Wal by his father.

“He took a forensic approach. Like a police lineup — you look at all of these people giving evidence and you realize each one tells a slightly different story, and you’ve got to try and work out what the actual facts of the matter are. All of the stories — doesn’t matter where you go around the globe — have common elements.”

What those common elements described — battles of planets in the sky, gods exchanging Thunderbolts, the hero planet that saved the Earth from chaos — looked, to anyone willing to take the forensic approach seriously, like eyewitness reports of close planetary encounters in the recent past. Mars’s enormous “Scarface” gash, Valles Marineris, extending a third of the way around the planet, has no clean geological explanation — but North American indigenous traditions named Mars Scarface long before any spacecraft saw it.

And the shapes the ancients sculpted as Thunderbolts? They don’t look like the lightning bolts we see today. They look exactly like the high-energy plasma forms produced in the z-pinch machine at Los Alamos — laboratory plasma discharges drawing more energy than every power station on Earth combined into something the size of a baked-bean tin.

For drawing the connection, Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision — a New York Times bestseller for many months — was the subject of one of the first organized academic boycotts of the twentieth century. His books were effectively suppressed. Burned, in the figurative sense and arguably in the literal sense.

“Appealing to man-made laws against something that was witnessed by people around the entire Earth is not a sufficient argument.”

Wal met Velikovsky at the 1974 McMaster University conference and later visited him in Princeton, where he asked the question that shaped his next half-century: what is the true nature of gravity? Velikovsky didn’t know. Wal spent the rest of his life answering.

Mankind in Amnesia

One of the most striking parts of the interview was Wal’s discussion of Velikovsky’s last and least-known book, Mankind in Amnesia.

“It’s like somebody who suffered a terrible trauma in their life and cannot face it — it keeps popping up subconsciously, and the impetus then is to repeat the trauma in some way, either observing somebody else undergoing it, or visiting it on yourself.”

Velikovsky’s argument — and Wal’s — is that the entire species is carrying unprocessed trauma from ancient close-encounter events, and that our compulsive repetition of catastrophe (warfare, disaster films, the constant rehearsal of doomsday) is what trauma always does when it isn’t faced. He worried, in the Cold War era, that humanity would re-enact what the gods had done — only this time with our own weapons.

Wal also pointed to Iain McGilchrist’s work on the divided brain, noting that modern education systems actively disable the critical faculty rather than build it. You leave university having absorbed a smooth Darwinian story of science marching toward a “theory of everything,” when the real history is full of suppressed controversies, dominant personalities, and political accidents that got frozen into textbooks.

The Deep Impact Prediction

The piece of the interview I’ll keep coming back to is the Deep Impact story. In 2005, NASA flew a probe directly into Comet Tempel 1. Four years before the event, Wal published his prediction on his website: there would be an electrical flash before physical impact, the energy released would far exceed anything kinetic, and the physical crater would not be the significant feature.

That is exactly what happened. The flash came early. The brightness was so extreme it blinded the instruments meant to image the crater. Wired picked up the story. His website crashed under the traffic. Time magazine arranged an interview.

“It was quashed by experts.”

Three words. The way the system protects itself. Not refutation — quashing. He named it without rancor, which made it land harder.

The Forefathers Who Were Sidelined

Wal worked inside a lineage the textbooks barely acknowledge.

Kristian Birkeland (1867–1917) correctly described the aurora as charged particles streaming along magnetic field lines from the sun. He was ridiculed. The currents bearing his name weren’t satellite-confirmed until the 1970s, decades after his death. He died nearly broke.

Hannes Alfvén (1908–1995) won the 1970 Nobel Prize for magnetohydrodynamics. He used his Nobel lecture to warn his colleagues that 99% of the visible universe is plasma and cannot be modeled with gravity alone. The mainstream took his MHD equations and quietly set aside his cosmology.

Halton “Chip” Arp (1927–2013), Hubble’s protégé at Mt. Wilson and Palomar, photographed quasars physically connected to nearby galaxies but with wildly different redshifts. He argued some redshift is intrinsic, not distance-related. Wal called him “the second Galileo” — “a truly observational astronomer and theorist who was one of the most outstanding astronomical newcomers back the type of Hubble.” The response wasn’t engagement with the data. It was denial of telescope time. Arp finished his career in Germany.

Anthony Peratt, Alfvén’s intellectual heir at Los Alamos, showed plasma scaling laws extend from the lab bench to galactic structure — and his simulations reproduce spiral galaxies from interacting Birkeland currents without invoking a single particle of dark matter.

Eric Lerner wrote The Big Bang Never Happened in 1991 and has since shown — using JWST data — that the early universe contains mature structures that shouldn’t exist on the Big Bang timeline. Wal recommended Lerner’s book directly in the interview as the accessible entry point to peer-reviewed plasma cosmology.

Ralph Juergens, an engineer from Flagstaff, Arizona, worked out the electric model of the Sun in the early 1970s. Charles Bruce had laid the groundwork in the 1940s and 50s. Don Scott, retired professor of electrical engineering, joined Wal in the early 2000s and extended Juergens’s model. Their SAFIRE project — the Sun in a Bottle experiment in Toronto — was designed to test Juergens’s electric-sun hypothesis against direct laboratory measurement.

None of these are quacks. They’re credentialed researchers whose work didn’t fit the institutional story and got selectively forgotten.

The Institutional Capture

Wal’s diagnosis lined up closely with what Eric Weinstein has been documenting from inside theoretical physics — that the field has become a captured market in which prestige, grants, hiring, and peer review function less as truth-finding mechanisms than as filters selecting for ideas already inside the consensus. Weinstein treats string theory as the clearest example: decades of effort, no falsifiable predictions, an infinite landscape of solutions, and a series of rebrands keeping the program alive without ever putting it at risk. Worth noting that Weinstein’s own alternative, Geometric Unity, has its own technical critics — he can be sharp on the diagnosis and contested on his cure. Both can be true. Use his diagnostic work; weigh his proposed cure on its own merits.

In a parallel lineage, Nassim Haramein has drawn on Elizabeth Rauscher’s work — particularly her extensions of Maxwell’s equations to include torsion and vacuum structure — to argue that what mainstream physics calls “dark matter” and “dark energy” is largely an accounting artifact of ignoring the energetic structure of the vacuum. Haramein’s Schwarzschild Proton work generated a proton charge radius prediction later corroborated by muonic hydrogen measurements. Like Weinstein, he has critics. The diagnosis still stands: the missing 99.8% of the universe’s mass-energy isn’t actually missing. The model is.

The Ether That Was Renamed, Not Removed

Wal pressed on a related historical point in the interview: that Einstein’s 1905 special relativity is taught as having dispensed with the ether, when in fact Einstein reversed himself within fifteen years.

In his May 5, 1920 Leiden address, Einstein said: “According to the general theory of relativity, space without ether is unthinkable.” He went on: “To deny the ether is ultimately to assume that empty space has no physical qualities whatever.” He wrote more than five papers between 1920 and 1934 treating the ether as physical reality. Tesla never accepted the burial. Dirac formally resurrected it in 1951 in a Nature letter titled Is There an Aether?

It was renamed, not removed. Quantum vacuum, gravitational field, spacetime metric, Higgs field, zero-point energy — these are the modern words for what the 19th century called the ether. Same medium, different labels, with the political advantage of carrying none of Tesla’s fingerprints. A centralized, metered energy economy sits more comfortably in a universe with no transmission medium than in one with a universal one.

No conspiracy required. Institutional inertia and textbook lag do most of the work.

A Text Exchange I Won’t Forget

I had a text exchange with Wal directly, and I shared two things with him. The first was a prediction about the Philae probe approaching comet 67P:

The Philae probe does not carry sufficient electrical protection for its landing, and the mission team has not adequately accounted for the cometary electrical potential it will encounter. They are going to be surprised.

The mechanics were straightforward. The mission team had not adequately accounted for the electrical potential difference between the spacecraft and the comet. A metallic probe approaching a charged body through a charged plasma environment is going to discharge — basic engineering, not exotic physics. I’d also been struck by something else worth noticing about how electricity actually moves in the wild: arcs rarely take a direct route. They meander, the way water meanders, branching and re-branching, finding paths of least resistance through whatever medium they’re in. Nature seems to prefer that kind of patterning over straight lines, and the comet’s irregular surface and uneven charge distribution looked like exactly the kind of environment that would produce discharge geometries the mission team hadn’t designed for.

Alongside the prediction, I also sent Wal a broader observation about what I think electricity actually is:

I believe Electricity is reflecting an intelligence which desires diversity and fertility, expressing the most beneficial outcome for a particular goal of which is at first challenging to understand. It appears as though “unnecessarily” complex patterns emerge, but the hidden intelligence often will be revealed with more research. Being able to create polarities that can attract and repel at the very same time create a dynamic equilibrium that creates complex fractal-like expression. It’s as though intelligent “Feelers” or “Pre-Electric” sensor waves seek out the many paths and a beneficial choice is made of how the ‘electrons’ will propagate. For those who have studied the ‘Electric Universe’ concepts, think of the complex array of electrical charges that appear (initially invisibly) over a large mass of land which causes electrical bonds which prevent erosion, creating complex forms. This demonstration below is revealing another intelligence (or innate equilibrium) of anode/cathode interrelating and seemingly avoiding directly shorting. So much being revealed here I think.

Wal replied in strong agreement. One exchange, but it mattered.

Why Science Needs a Consciousness Turn

There’s a thread that intersects all of this and deserves naming.

Orthodox science still runs on a roughly 300-year-old assumption: that mind is irrelevant to matter. The observer is treated as a passive recorder, consciousness as a late-arriving byproduct of brain chemistry. But the anomalies have been piling up for over a century, and they all point the same direction.

Carl Jung and Wolfgang Pauli proposed the unus mundus — the one world — in which mind and matter are two faces of the same underlying reality, connected by synchronicity as a non-causal principle. From 1979 to 2007, the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research lab, founded by Robert Jahn, ran millions of trials in which human operators measurably influenced the output of random event generators, with odds against chance in the billions to one. PEAR was shut down in 2007 not because the data failed but because it was institutionally inconvenient. The Global Consciousness Project, run by Roger Nelson, has continued the work with networked REGs that deviate from randomness during moments of collective focus. Dean Radin has replicated PEAR-style findings and demonstrated presentiment effects, where the body responds to emotional stimuli seconds before they are randomly presented.

This is the transformation: a science that admits the observer is part of the system, that mind and matter are co-arising, that intention and coherent group focus leave measurable fingerprints on the physical world. The materialist frame had a 300-year run. It can’t account for the universe we actually live in.

Light, Consciousness, and Walter Russell

Wal also seemed to understand something most physicists won’t touch: that electricity and light are not just passive phenomena but carry an organizing, possibly conscious quality. He came at this from several angles across his lectures and writing. He talked about the universe as fundamentally connected — that the Sun and Earth must “know” where each other are at every instant, because the orbital mechanics simply don’t work if gravity propagates at the speed of light. He talked about the foundational assumptions around gravity, light, and time as containing real errors — not refinements, errors. He talked about matter as electrically responsive at every scale, with what we call mass and gravity being secondary effects of more primary electrical structure. And in the interview with John he came right out and said it: “we’re not lonely isolated objects floating around in a giant void; we’re all connected to everything else in the universe all the time.” That’s not a sentence a strict materialist can write.

His sense of what light actually is mapped closely to what Walter Russell described almost a century ago.

Russell saw light not as a thing that travels but as the fundamental substance of the universe — the visible expression of Mind/Source thinking creation into being. Light is reproduced wave by wave across electric fields, so each point in space re-expresses the pattern rather than receiving a traveling particle. All matter is light in various states of motion, compression, and polarity within a “Two-Way Universe” of balanced opposites. Light and consciousness are inseparable.

Notice how naturally that sits next to a real ether, next to a plasma universe, next to the PEAR data on mind influencing matter. The lineages converge.

What He Said to His Younger Self

The last question John asked was beautiful. If you could meet yourself at twenty, what would you say? Wal’s answer:

“Don’t be in any hurry. And your intuition — intuition is a kind of connection to the universe. It’s something you shouldn’t just ignore... I don’t have to know how it’s going to work. All I have to do is maintain the vision of where I want to go.”

He closed with a Japanese Zen saying he loved: Great doubt, great faith.

Keeping the Voice Alive

Wal left behind his wife of fifty-seven years, Faye, and a large extended family, and a body of work that will outlast every gatekeeper currently trying to ignore it. In the months before his death he was focused on the first JWST images, watching predictions he’d made decades earlier come in one by one.

Thank you, John, for sitting down with him. For asking the right questions, for letting him talk, for keeping it on tape so the rest of us could be in the room. And thank you, Wal, for fifty years of not being in a hurry, of trusting the intuition, of refusing the easy career path and walking the hard one anyway.

Share the interview. The shift has to come from underneath — Wal said so himself. We owe him that much.

— Dan